1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a node booting method in a high-speed parallel computer, and more particularly to a node booting method of an operating system in a high-speed parallel computer which can impartially manage shared resources within the system and also display a boot progress state on a console terminal, thus providing a user-friendly system manager interface.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Typically, in a MPP (Massively Parallel Processing) system in which a plurality of nodes constitute a single system via an interconnect network, such as SPAX, it is important to minimize the time that all the nodes take to load an operating kernel image onto their memories. Also, there is a need for a method by which each node can copy a same operating system kernel image from the operating system onto its memory simultaneously when it can start executing the operating system simultaneously, thus making it possible to share resources managed by all the nodes and also to manage the state at which a booting is in progress. In view of technical aspect, in order for the node boot to be executed in parallel in loading the same kernel image onto the memories of all the nodes, there are several requirements; information on the nodes constituting the system must be used so that the nodes of the subject matter to be copied can be decided; the boot path must be decided so that the boot progress by the other nodes should not be obstructed while the booting is in progress and a support on an internodes communication method by a firmware should be provided since the booting is progressed by the firmware of each node.
In a conventional node booting technique, a method has been used by which a communicating driver down loads a minimum boot code to a boot server simultaneously with the start-up of the system and then loads a kernel image of an operating system in an imaginary disk filing system onto respective memories of the nodes via a disk of a remote node. However, in the imaginary disk scheme, as several nodes request to read a disk for the single boot server at the same time, there are problems that it thereby degrades a lowered booting speed and also necessitates a complicated communicating driver by which a firmware can support this.
Therefore, a new method has been desired by which a kernel image of an operating system can be loaded onto a memory from a boot disk in a boot node, a same kernel image can be copied onto all the nodes constituting the system, while a node booting for several nodes can be performed in parallel in order to reduce a booting time, simultaneous execution of the kernel of the operating system can be made by all the nodes and also the state at which the boot is in progress can be monitored using a console terminal connected to the boot node, even by a conventional method.